Why Google would be interested in buying Salesforce

Amid
all the chatter around Salesforce’s rumored acquisition,
another tech giant has emerged as a possible bidder: Google.

According to Pivotal Research Group, Salesforce’s marketing
automation technology, which helps companies create and drive
marketing campaigns more efficiently, makes it an attractive
acquisition target for Google.

Pivotal says both products fall in the marketing technology
segment because they all use a marketer’s actual data on
customers and prospects. Bunches of that data resides in
Salesforce’s marketing software. Marketers love this data. And
Google wants its users to get access to it.

“The logic might go, why not push boundaries wherever possible in
order to maximize the potential value that Google can offer
advertisers and consumers alike?” the report said.

Another benefit of buying Salesforce is it gives Google more
leverage against Facebook in the small and mid-sized business
market. The SMB advertising market is a huge part of Google’s
business, but Facebook has been gaining a lot of ground in that
space recently. Salesforce has a dominant position in sales and
customer service among SMB customers. Google can definitely use
some of that data to expand its advertising offerings in that
market.

“Google has significant capacity to develop a category-killer in
this space,” it said.

Pivotal made sure its report is highly speculative and it has no
strong view on the chances of the deal actually going through.
But it also said that Google is aware of the “growing
intersection of advertising, ad tech, and marketing technology,”
and that a Salesforce acquisition would only help it gain a
better position in that space.

But it’s also worth noting that
Credit Suisse picked Google as a possible bidder for
Salesforce in an earlier report. The reason: it would give Google
a huge enterprise salesforce and application base, including
marketing automation and campaign management systems.